Matilda Joslyn Gage

Wives

Under Roman law before Christianity had gained control of the empire, a form of marriage existed known as “Usus,” which secured much freedom to wives. It was entered into without the terrifying religious ceremonies which made “Confarreatio,” practically indissoluble and the wife the veritable slave of the husband, who held power even over her life. Neither did it possess the civil formality of “Coemptio” under which the bride purchased entrance into the marriage duties and her husband’s household by the payment of three pieces of copper.[1] “Coemptio” like “Confarreatio” gave the husband entire power over the person and property of the wife, while “Usus,” a form of simple consent left the wife practically free, keeping her own name and property. The real origin of this form of marriage is not fully known. Maine declared it to be as old as or even older than the Twelve Tables, under which woman possessed the right to repudiation in marriage. These laws, a compilation of still older ones, were afterwards incorporated into statutes by a woman of Athens, and were received by the Romans as extremely pure natural laws.[2] Plato refers to an early Athens entirely ruled by women, its laws of pre-eminently just character. Tradition, whose basis is half forgotten, half remembered history, attributes the origin of Athens to the ancient Atlantians. The former existence of this submerged continent is daily becoming more fully recognized. The explorations of the “Challenger,” the “Dolphin,” the “Gazelle,” and the discoveries of Le Plongeon in Yucatan, at later date, confirming olden tradition. Maine thus ascribes a much older origin to “Usus” than Gibbon, who attributes it to the effect of the Punic triumphs.[3] In reality “Usus” seems to have been a reminiscence of the Matriarchate, incorporated into the law of the Twelve Tables, and accepted by Rome as a more just form of the marriage relation for women than the religious “Confarraetio” or the civil form of “Coemptio.” But as Rome increased in wealth and luxurious modes of living, the influence of the Patriarchate correspondingly extended, the perception of justice at the same time diminishing. Pomp and ceremony were associated with the marriage rite among patricians, while “Usus” was regarded as a plebeian form especially suited to the populace. But at later date when Rome rebelling against the tyranny of her rulers, tended towards a republican form of government, “Usus” again became general. It was impossible for patrician women not to see the greater freedom of plebeian wives under “Usus,” a form that while equally binding in the essentials of the union did not make the wife a marital slave,[4] and “Usus” eventually became the basis of Roman legal conception of marriage, against which Christianity from the first waged a warfare of ever increasing fierceness,[5] the very foundation of that religion being the subordination of woman in every relation of life. Under “Usus” the mere fact of two persons living together as husband and wife was regarded as a marriage. If during each year the wife remained away from the home for three days, she kept herself from under her husband’s power. She remained a part of her father’s family; her husband could not mortgage or in any way alienate her property. This was absolutely contrary to the laws of the christian form of marriage, under which the wife surrendered her person, her property, and her conscience, into the indisputable control of the husband. Under “Usus” a large proportion of Roman property fell into woman’s hands. She became the real estate holder of the Eternal City and its provinces, and in consequence was treated with great respect; the holding of property, especially of real estate conducing to that end. Under “Usus” the cruelties sanctioned by “Confarraetio” were rendered impossible; a wife could no longer be put to death, as was formerly the custom, for having tasted wine, a treacherous kiss from her husband upon his return home, betraying her, nor could her infant daughter be exposed or murdered at the pleasure of her husband who as inexorable master was frequently wont to refuse her pleadings for the life of her babe, calling her prayers naught but the scruples of a foolish woman.[6]

Thus under “Usus” human life became more sacred, and woman endowed with a greater sense of personal security. It affected an entire change for the better, in the moral sentiments of the Roman empire.[7] A complete revolution had thus passed over the constitution of the family. This must have been the period, says Maine, when a juriconsulist of the empire defined marriage as a life long fellowship of all divine and human rights.

Not alone Maine, but also Reeves, failed not to see that the disruption of the Roman Empire was very unfavorable to the personal and proprietory rights of woman.[8] The practical effect of the common Roman form of marriage being the absolute legal independence of the wife, under which a large proportion of Roman property fell into the hands of women, the wife retaining her family name and family inheritance. All this was changed as soon as Christianity obtained the rule. Under Christian forms of marriage a wife was taken from her own family and transferred into that of her husband the same as a piece of property. She assumed his name, the same as the slave took that of the new master to whom he was transferred. That this idea of the wife as a slave did not belong alone to the earlier christian period, but is a part of christian doctrine of today is clearly shown by the continued custom of a woman’s dropping her family name upon marriage and assuming that of the husband-master.

For this middle Roman period carried its blessings to wives no longer than until the empire became christianized, when the tyranny of ecclesiastical marriage again fell to woman’s lot. While under the influence of “Usus,” Roman jurists of the middle period had declared the ownership of property by married women to be a principle of equity; this drew forth opposing legislation from the christians, and under christian law, the husband again became master of his wife’s person, and property, her children also falling under his entire control, the mother possessing no authority over them. From that period down to the twentieth century of christianity, under all changing civil laws, woman has ever felt the oppressions of ecclesiasticism in this relation.[9]

Guizot strangely declares that woman’s present, and what he terms, superior, position in the household today, is due to feudalism.[10] The isolation and strife under which the nobility lived during the feudal period, warring against each other when not engaged in foreign aggression, compelled to certain forms of social life within each castle, thus creating the modern family, or the family under its present social form. At that period the feudal wife with her retinue of household serfs and a vast number of her husband’s retainers in charge, held a more responsible position than that of woman under primitive christian habits of life. But the knights and lords of these feudal castles were lecherous robbers, rather than men of kindly regard for womankind. Their inclination was not towards justice or family life, but the despoiling of all beneath them, and even of their equals with whom they were not upon terms of amity. The ruins of such castles, like the nest of the eagle, perched upon some inaccessible rock, add today an element of picturesque beauty to the Rhine and other rivers of Europe, but owe their elevated and isolated positions of the evil character of their owners, the banditti of the middle ages.[11] When not engaged with their king in warfare, they made the despoiling of serfs and the betrayal of wives and daughters their chief diversion, the robbery of burghers and travelers their business; churchmen equally with laymen living by the same means.

During the year 1268, Rudolph of Germany, destroyed sixty-six castles of these christian robber nobility in Thuringia alone, and hung twenty-nine of these “family builders” at one time in Erfurt. He compared Rome to the lion’s den in fable; the footsteps of many animals to be found going thither, but none coming back. At this period the soldiers of Christian Europe found pleasure in torture for its own sake, chiefly selecting women as their victims. In mediaeval England the condition of woman was one of deep degradation. Wives were bought and daughters sold for many hundred years after the introduction of Christianity.[12] Although England was christianized in the fourth century, it was not until the tenth that the christian wife of a christian husband acquired the right of eating at table with him, nor until the same century did a daughter gain the right of rejecting the husband her father might have selected for her. While the sale of daughters was practiced in England for seven hundred years after the introduction of Christianity, we note that by the ancient law of India, a father was forbidden to sell his daughter in marriage, or receive the smallest present therefor. In mediaeval England the daughter was held as a portion of the father’s property to be sold to the highest bidder. The Mundium[13] recognized the father’s right to sell his daughter to the husband he might select for her, usually the highest bidder in point of wealth or political influence. While Marquette pertained to kings, feudal lords, and men of no family relationship to the victim, Mundium inhered in the father himself. Through it he sacrificed his own daughter for money or power.

The practice of buying wives with cattle or money was regulated both in the laws of King Aethelbert and King Ine. In event of the woman who had been thus bought, becoming a widow, half of the sum paid for her seems to have been set aside for her support, provided her husband had not died without issue. The other half remained absolutely the property of her father, brother, or guardian by whom she had been sold. At a somewhat later period the church doctrine of celibacy influenced all ranks of men, while at the same time an unmarried woman because of her maidenhood was regarded as disreputable. A bachelor held honorable place, even though all celibate men were looked upon as libertines of especially impure life. Warnings against matrimony were the ordinary topics of conversation, while virtue in women was held so little sacred that no nearness of relationship was security for either a married or a single woman.[14] Husbands trafficked in the honor of their wives, fathers sold their daughters,[15] yet if under temptation, a woman fell, outside of such sale, her punishment was most severe. To a husband was accorded the power of life and death over his household, and either personally or by means of a hired assassin he not unfrequently assigned his wife to death or to a punishment more atrocious and barbarous.[16] Disraeli says:

If in these ages of romance and romances the fair sex were scarcely approached without the devotion of idolatry, whenever “the course of true love” altered; when the frail spirit loved too late, and should not have loved, the punishment became more criminal than the crime, for there was more selfish revenge and terrific malignity than of justice when autocratical man became the executioner of his own decree.

The English christian husband of that age is paralleled by certain North American Indians of the present day.[17] The horizon of woman’s life was bounded by the wishes of her father or husband. Single, she was regarded as a more or less valuable piece of property[18] for whose sale the owner was entitled to make as good a bargain as possible. It was as a bride that the greatest sum was secured.[19] Prominent among the laws of the first Christian king of Kent, were provisions for the transfer of money or cattle in exchange for the bride.[20] The theory of woman’s ownership by man was everywhere carried into practice, and with great severity in case the wife proved unfaithful to her enforced vows. The facts that her consent to the marriage had not been asked, that mayhap the man she was forced to wed was utterly repugnant to her, that her affections might already have been bestowed, that she was transferred like a piece of goods with no voice upon the question, were not taken into consideration, and did the husband not choose to kill his derelict spouse, the question still remained one of property,[21] and a new bride was demanded of the lover in place of the wife whose love he had gained.

A husband, attracted by a new face, more wealth, greater political influence, or for any reason desiring to be rid of his wife, was regarded as justifiable in hiring an assassin to strangle her, or if walking by a river-brink, of himself pushing her into the water where her cries for help were disregarded. Those in whose hearts pity rose, were prevented from giving aid, but such remarks as, “It is nothing, only a woman being drowned.”[22] A horse or other domestic animal received more consideration than the women of a household. Notwithstanding this period, the early part of the fourteenth century, before the days of printing or rapid intercourse between nations, yet the evil fame of christendom reached distant lands. Its hypocrisy and baseness were known by those very Saracens from whom the Crusaders attempted to wrest the Holy Sepulchre. To Sir John Mandeville, the Sultan of Egypt mercilessly criticized the christianity of England[23] and the christian method of serving God; the total disregard of chastity, the sale of daughters, sisters and wives. We cannot agree with Disraeli in his doubts if there was a single christian in all christendom at this period. To the contrary, it may be regarded as an epoch when the doctrines of christianity were most fully sustained, the church at that time carrying out the principles of both the Old and the New Testament regarding women. From Moses to Paul, the Bible everywhere speaks of her as a being made for man, secondary to man, and under his authority by direct command of the Almighty; the state, as coadjutor and servant of the church, basing her codes of law[24] upon its teachings. Under these codes woman has not only been looked upon as naturally unchaste, but also regarded as a liar, the state demanding the testimony of two or three, and in some instances of seven women to invalidate that of one man; the man even then in extreme cases clearing himself by his single oath. Condemned as having brought evil into the world, woman’s every step was looked upon with suspicion, and the most brutal treatment as far short of her just deserts. To speak well of her was to cause misgivings of one’s self. The system of defamation inaugurated by the church in reference to women, was later recognized by the Jesuits as a most effective plan for the personal subjugation of men. Busenbaum, an influential writer of this order, directing:

Whenever you would ruin a person you must begin by spreading calumnies to defame them. Repetition and perseverance will at length give the consistency of probability, and the calumnies will stick to a distant day.

The astute Jesuits learned their lesson from church treatment of women. Its practical results were ever before their eyes in the contempt with which woman was regarded, and her own consequent loss of self respect. Under early and mediaeval christian law, as in most states today, the father alone had right to the disposal of his children. He possessed the sole power of giving away his daughter in marriage; if he died, this right devolved upon the eldest son; only in case there were no sons was the right of the mother in any way recognized. If neither father or brother were living, the mother gave her daughter away in marriage, and this was the only instance in which one woman possessed control over another woman, the law allowing the mother no voice in the marriage of her daughter unless she was a widow without sons. So greatly enslaved were daughters, that non-consent of the victim in no way impaired the validity of the marriage.[25] A girl was simply a piece of family property to be disposed of as the family thought best. Although wives were simply the slaves of husbands, yet the condition of an unmarried woman was even more deplorable. Deprived of the society of young persons of her own sex, not allowed speech with any man outside of her own family, she was fortunate if she escaped personal[26] ill-treatment in her father’s house. Not permitted to sit in the presence of either her father or her mother, continually found fault with, the laws constraining her to marry while giving her no preference as to a husband, and marriage still more fully taking from her the control of her own person, yet it was anxiously looked forward to as at least a change of masters, and the constant hope that in the husband she might find a lover who for dear love’s sake would treat her with common humanity.

Such was the condition of women during eighteen hundred years of christianity. Legislated for as slaves, imprisoned for crimes that if committed by a man were only punished by branding the hand; buried alive for other crimes that committed by men were atoned for by the payment of a fine; denied a share in the government of the family or the church, their very sex deemed a curse, the twentieth century is now about to open showing no truly enlightened nation upon the face of the earth. From the barbarism of inhumanity the world is slowly awakening to the fact that every human being stands upon the plane of equal natural rights. The Church has not taught the world this great truth, the State has not conceded it; its acknowledgment thus far, has been due to the teachings of individual men and women, that self-constituted authority over others a crime against humanity. Under christian teaching regarding woman, the daughter was looked upon as a more remote relative and heir than the son and this upon the ground of her inferiority. Blackstone, although admitting that such views did not pertain in Rome, yet speaks of males as “the worthier of blood.” Such views were not held by pre-christian Britain. Under common law, before that country accepted christianity, property was equally divided between sisters, and only by special custom, between brothers.[27] But as early as Henry II it was the general rule that a woman could not share an inheritance with a man. An exception sometimes existed in a particular city where such custom had long prevailed.

Until quite recently, English women have not been permitted to express an opinion upon political questions, although the Primrose League and other similar organizations have effected a great change within a few years. Yet it is but little more than two hundred years, in 1664, at Henley-upon-Thames, a woman having spoken against the taxation imposed by Parliament, was condemned for this freedom of political criticism, to have her tongue nailed to the body of a tree at the highway side upon a market day, and a paper fastened to her back detailing the heinousness of her offense. It was thus the state deterred similar politically-minded women from the expression of their views, and in line with the church used its most stringent measures to retain woman in the “sphere” to which both church and state assigned her. Many savage tribes of Africa exhibit the same grade of civilization that was extant in christian England from the fourth to the eighteenth centuries.

A father will sell his daughter among Unyamwazi, Africa, for one up to ten cows. A Lomali asks of a poor wooer from ten to twenty horses, of a wealthy one from 100 upward, together with fifty camels and 300 sheep. On the other hand, in Uganda, four oxen are sufficient to buy the most perfectly formed village belle, provided six needles and a box of cartridges are thrown in.

The sale is the same, the payment alone of different character. An African girl in case of a wealthy wooer, bringing even more than was ordinarily received during the middle ages for an English christian maiden. The patriarchal spirit wherever cropping out exhibiting the same characteristics, whether among Jews, Christians, or African savages. This is the more notable as among civilized or savage races yet governed by the principles of the Matriarchate, the position of woman is very high. In Samoa, no woman is compelled to work, all labor of whatever character being performed by the men. The celebrated traveler, Prof. Carl Lumholz, in his work “Among the Cannibals,” makes some interesting statements in regard to the course adopted by the natives of Georgia River, Australia, to save women from giving birth to undesired children, and to prevent the needless suffering and infant mortality so common in christian lands.

Among the methods adopted in christian countries for a continuance of the crimes common in the marriage relation, have been more or less stringent laws against divorce, ever falling with heaviest force upon her whom christian marriage laws have made a slave. The “Christian Union” declares as a significant act of evil import, that “in Wyoming, where the power of woman in affairs of government is greatest, one divorce takes place in every six marriages, the proportion being greater than in any other state.” But if this assertion of the “Christian Union” is true, it is proof that a share in making the laws which govern her is wisely used by the women of that state; and it marks a new era in civilization, when woman holding political power in her own hands, refuses longer to degrade herself by living in a relation that has lost the binding power of love. The laws of church and of state during the christian ages originated with man, and it is a promising sign of woman’s growth in self-reliance, independent thought, and purity of character, that she thus protests against the bondage of a relation which virtually holds the wife as slave of the husband; for despite the changes of the last four and a half decades, we still find the general tone of legislation in line with the church teaching of woman’s created inferiority to man. We still find belief in the wife’s duty of obedience to the husband; we still discover the church, the state, the world, all regarding the exercise of her own judgment even upon the questions most closely related to herself as woman’s greatest sin. As free as woman is called today, she has not yet as daughter secured perfect liberty of choice in marriage, the power of the family too often compelling her into a hated relation. Money still leads parents to prefer one suitor above another, even in the United States; while in many European countries, marriages are arranged by friends, or through a broker, entirely without the girl’s consent, who is frequently taken from a convent or school to be thus sold to some wealthy and perhaps octogenarian wooer, who covets the youth or beauty of the victim.[28]

The burning of twenty missionaries in a portion of savage Africa, a few years since, filled the civilized world with horror. But for several hundred years after the introduction of christianity into Great Britain, the penalty for simple theft by a woman slave was burning alive, and all the other women slaves were compelled to assist her auto-de-fe. Upon such an occasion mentioned by Pike, eighty other women each brought a log of wood for the burning.[29] By the old Roman Code, burning alive as a punishment was forbidden because of its barbarity, but christianity reintroduced it, and for long centuries after the destruction of the Roman Empire, that other land aspiring to control of the sea, which proudly boasts that the sun never sets on her possessions, kept it in her criminal code for the punishment of helpless women.[30] So rigorous was woman’s slavery that the friendships of women with each other, or with men, were strictly prohibited; yet the deep affection of one man for another to whom he consecrated his life and fortune, and of whom he spoke with that deep tenderness, was highly commended.[31] The despotic, irresponsible power of husbands in christian England at this period is shown by the diverse manner in which the murder of a wife by a husband, or a husband by a wife, was regarded. For husband to murder a wife either by his own hands or those of a hired assassin, was of frequent occurrence, but as she was his slave over whom he had power of life and death, this was looked upon as a trivial affair. But under the laws of both church and state, the murder of a husband by a wife was regarded as petty treason, to be punished with the utmost severity, burning alive being a not uncommon form.[32]

Under christian legislation not alone the wife’s person but her property so fully became her husband’s that her use of any portion of it thereafter without his consent was regarded as theft; and such is still the law in the majority of christian countries; it is less than sixty years since a change in this respect took place in any part of the christian world. While a wife may steal from her husband it is still the law that a husband cannot steal from his wife. If she allows him to transact business for her, or in any way obtain possession of her property even for a moment, he has acquired its legal ownership. Since the passage of the Married Woman’s Property Act, the courts of England have decided that a husband cannot steal from his wife while she is living with him. A case before Baron Huddleston, 1888, commented upon by the Pall Mall Gazette, under head of “Stealing from a Wife,” called attention to the superior position of the mistress in respect to property rights over that of the wife.

Can a husband rob his wife? Baron Huddleston yesterday answered this by saying he can not rob her at all under the common law, which regards all the wife’s property as the husband’s; and, theft is only robbery under the Married Women’s Property Act, when the wife is living apart from her husband, or when he is preparing to desert her. It is really quite amazing how many advantages a mistress has over a wife in all matters relating to property and to person. It almost seems as if the object of the law was to inflict such disabilities on wives in order to induce the fair sex to prefer concubinage to matrimony.

The separate moral codes for man and woman in all christian lands, show their evil aspect in many ways. Adultery, in all christian countries is held to be less sinful for men than for women. In England, while the husband can easily obtain a divorce from the wife upon the ground of adultery, it is almost impossible for the wife to obtain a divorce from the husband upon the same ground. Nothing short of the husband’s bringing another woman into the house to sustain wifely relations to him, at all justifies her in proceedings for a separation; and even then, the husband retains a right to all the wife’s property of which he was in possession, or which may have fallen into his hands. Less than a dozen years since, an English husband willed his wife’s property to his mistress and her children of whom he was the father. The wife, (in what is known as “The Birchall Case”), contested the will, but the courts not only decided in its favor, but added insult to that legal robbery, by telling the wife that a part of her money was enough for her, and that she ought to be willing that her husband’s mistress and illegitimate children should share it with her.

Woman’s disobedience to man is regarded by both the church and the state as disobedience to God. As late as the first half of the present century it was held as constructive treason, in England, punishable by the state, for a wife to refuse obedience to her husband’s commands or in any way to question his authority. She was required to be under submission to him as the direct representative of the deity. For the woman who protested against this annihilation of her individuality, a flogging was the customary form of punishment and so common was the use of the whip that its size was regulated by law.[33] The punishment of petit treason[34] was more severe for woman than for man because her crime was regarded as of a more heinous character. She was dragged on the ground or pavement to the place of execution then burned alive; a man was drawn and hanged. It was long after the conquest before even a man convicted of treason secured the right of being carried to execution on a sledge or hurdle. Blackstone comments upon the extreme torment of being dragged on the ground or pavement. In case of a woman the wounds and lacerations thus received must have greatly added to her intensity of suffering, yet so blinded was he through those laws, that he calls her punishment of burning, a tribute to the “decency due to the sex.”[35]

During a portion of the christian era the wife has not been looked upon as related to her husband. The residuum of this disbelief in the relationship of husband and wife, occasionally shows itself to the present day.[36] She was his slave under both religious and civil law, holding the same relations to him as the subject did to the king, and liable to punishments similar to those inflicted upon unruly slaves, or disloyal subjects. Rebellion against the husband’s authority was treason punishable by law, similarly as treason to the king. The difference was but in name. Down to the end of the eighteenth century in England, the wife who had murdered her husband was burned alive; if the husband murdered his wife he suffered simple decapitation, “the same as if he had murdered any other stranger.” For the wife’s crime of petit treason the penalty was that of the slave who had killed her master. It is scarcely a hundred years since the punishment of burning the wife alive for the murder of her husband, or the female slave for the murder of her master, as petit treason, passed out of the English penal code; the last instance occurring in 1784, eight years after our declaration of independence. This same code was operative in the colonies; the last woman thus punished in this country, being a slave in 1755, who had murdered her master, America having twenty-nine years precedence in the abolition of this penalty.[37]

A cablegram from Europe, September 1892, proves the continued existence in this last decade of the nineteenth century of the crime of petit treason, and also the barbarous punishment still inflicted under christian law, upon the wife who murders her husband. This case, occurring in Finland, was carried up to the Court of Appeals, which not only affirmed the decision of the lower court but decreed additional punishment. Because the wife had also forged her husband’s name for small sums of money, having under law, first been robbed by him of her earnings, the judgment of having her right hand cut off, was added to the original sentence. She was then decapitated, her body fastened to a stake, covered with inflammable material and burned to ashes. Although this wife was not burned alive, the barbarity of her punishment was most atrocious, and took place under the christian laws of the church and the state, in a Protestant country in the “year of our Lord,” 1892. That the punishment was infinitely more severe than would have been inflicted upon the husband in case he had murdered his wife, was due to christian teaching of woman’s inferiority and subordination to man; thus making the wife’s crime that of petit treason, under law only a trifle less heinous than murdering a king, or attempting destruction of the government. Had the husband murdered the wife it would have been, according to legal prevision, the same as if he had killed “any other stranger.” The marriage ceremony robbed her of her property and earnings, but in equity the money she was accused of stealing from him belonged to her. Under the laws of most christian states, a woman is robbed of herself and all of her possessions by the simple fact of her marriage. Under christian laws the services of the wife in the marital relation are all due to the husband,[38] her earnings all belong to him; she is a slave owning nothing and with no rights in the property her husband calls his own. This wife’s crime was provoked by pre-existing criminal legislation of the christian church and state. Possessing no legal right to the control of her own person, property or conscience, the wife was held to have sinned against a divinely appointed master to whom she owed more than human allegiance: she was a criminal so great that the punishment of severing her hand and head were deemed entirely inadequate, and her body fastened to a stake was covered with inflammable material and burned to ashes.[39]

While the external government of Finland, as declarations of war, peace, treaties, etc., is under control of the Czar, or Grand Duke, yet in the internal administration of affairs this country is an Independent State, under a Constitution dating 1772, and confirmed by three successive czars. It became christianized in the twelfth century but is not under the Greek church; its established religion is Evangelical and Lutheran, under control of the archbishop of Abo, and the bishops of Bogia and Knopo; an ecclesiastical assembly meeting every ten years; and the Diet, composed of representatives of the clergy, nobility, citizens and peasants, every five years. Without consent of these bodies no laws are enacted or repealed; but woman possesses no representation either in ecclesiastical or civil affairs.

The old law of marriage instituted by the church, which held the wife as belonging body and soul to the husband who not alone possessed control over her actions but decided her religion, is still extant. In but few countries do we see a tendency towards its abolition, even those that have somewhat favorably legislated upon the question, still retaining the general principle of a wife’s subserviency to her husband. A few years since an English lady desirous of uniting with the Catholic church was refused consent by her husband, “a staunch churchman.” Unknown to him she was received into that body, which proved occasion of an animated controversy between the husband and the late Cardinal Manning, the former basing his opposition and his letter of remonstrance to the cardinal upon the ground of the admitted legal right of a husband, under English law, to ordain the form of his wife’s religion.[40][a] Nor do we find material difference in the United States. In Virginia, in the winter of 1891, a wife, despite the opposition of her husband caused her infant to be baptized by an Episcopal clergyman into that church, the husband openly expressing his disapproval while the ceremony was in progress, and afterwards suing the clergyman for an interference with his vested rights over wife and child. This supreme authority of the husband in christian countries is shown in many strange ways. Among the Hindoos the naming of the child belongs to the mother. If the father expresses desire for a different name, each one is written upon a paper over which lighted lamps are set, the one burning the longest deciding the choice of name. But in Rhode Island as late as 1892, a controversy between the parents as to the naming of a child was settled by law. The father and mother each filed a certificate with the registrar; the father employing a lawyer who to the satisfaction of the city solicitor proved his client’s prior right, and an order was issued to the registrar in favor of the father’s choice of name.[41] The claim of the christian husband in each of these instances was that of his supreme and prior right, on the church theory incorporated into law, that both wife and child belong to the husband. The celebrated Agar-Ellis case in England during the latter part of the seventies, was brought by a wife to compel the keeping by a husband of his pledges in regard to the religious education of his children. The decision was against the wife, upon the general ground that a wife had no rights in law as against a husband. A man’s pledged word broken at the gaming table renders him infamous and subjects him to dishonor through life. But a husband’s pledged word broken to his wife, under ruling of the highest court and the profoundest legal talent of England, the Court of Appeals, and the Vice-Chancellor, is just, implying no dishonor, but rather entitling him to respect as a man who in a befitting manner has maintained his marital rights and authority. The judge instructed the wife that she had no right to teach her children what her husband did not believe, even though she herself most fully believed what she taught. He impressed upon her that she was not rearing her children for herself, but as her husband’s property, over which she possessed no control only in so far as the husband made her his agent. In affirming the order of the Vice-Chancellor, the court of appeals declared that the father had the legal right to bring up the children in his own faith, and in pledging his word to the contrary he had in no way forfeited or abandoned his authority. This decision of the English Court of Appeals, is in accord with the laws of the United States. The Albany N. Y. Law Journal in commenting upon this case under the head of “Curious Question,” declared the decision to be in harmony with the general rule as to religious education; the child is to be educated in the religion of the father.

The English Women’s Suffrage Journal in its comments, declared English law to be based upon the Koran, quoting, in proof, from a writer in the “Contemporary Review”:

The East has long been noted for the subordination of its women, and this subjection is not only preached by Mussulmans and Buddhists but even by Christian churches. Woman is not regarded as a person but as a field, cultivable or not, as the possessor desires. As a field can neither have faith, nor intellect, nor a will of its own, it would be absurd for a man to occupy himself about what a woman believes, thinks, or wishes. She is absolutely nothing but her husband’s domain. He cultivates it and reaps the harvest, for the harvest belongs to the proprietor.

According to the Women’s Suffrage Journal, this condition accurately depicted the spirit of the injunction laid upon Mrs. Agar-Ellis, by Lord Justice James.

To the wife and mother he declared that she had no right to teach her children what she believed, but must, to the contrary, teach them what her husband believed, whether she believed it or not; the law not concerning itself with what a woman believes, or wishes, as she is in law absolutely nothing but her husband’s domain.

The mistake of the Journal lies in ascribing this law to the teachings of the Koran, instead of the teachings of the Bible, which in general tone, and through particular instruction, places woman upon the same level as a man’s “flocks and herds, oxen and cattle.” We do not find the personal rights of women in the United States differing from those of the women of England. A famous suit was tried in Ohio, 1879, known as the “Lucy Walker Case,” a former wife suing the present wife for alienating her husband’s affections. Great attention was called to this suit from the high position of the parties; Judge Seney, former husband of one, and present husband[42] of the other wife, being widely known as author of a “Civil Code,” bearing his name. The suit gained still greater notoriety from the principle enunciated in his decision rendered against the plaintiff, by Judge Dodge, before whom the case came to trial; he dismissed it upon the ground that a wife had no rights as against her husband. All testimony upon part of the injured first wife was excluded upon the same ground. He decided:

First: That the husband has a property interest in his wife which the wife does not possess in the husband.

Second: That the law protects him in this right of property in her.

Third: Upon the ground that he holds her and dares the world to meddle with him in the holding.

Fourth: But on the contrary the wife looks alone to the husband, the law compelling her to do so.

Thus less than fifteen years since the legal decision was rendered in the United States, that a wife is a husband’s property; that the husband has a pecuniary interest in the wife, the law protecting his right of property in her, while the wife possesses no reciprocal right of property in the husband.

The Toledo Bee gave the full text of Judge Dodge’s decision:

The question submitted in this: Has a wife such a property in her husband, has she such a legal pecuniary interest in him, that she can bring an action at law against one who injures him, against one who imprisons him, and, finally, can a wife recover damages at law against a woman who has carnal intercourse with her husband without her consent? It will be at once admitted that the question is a novel one. Our courts adjudicate primarily upon property interests. A husband has a pecuniary, a property interest in his wife. The law protects this right of property.

A father can recover damages against a man who seduces his daughter, but a mother can not recover for the seduction of a daughter. Why not? Is she not as dear to the mother as the father? Nay, dearer, by as much as a mother’s love exceeds a father’s. But she has not property in her, is not entitled to her wages; neither is a mother bound to support her children. The father is the head of the family, not the mother. He, by virtue of his headship, is legally entitled to the services of his family. The husband is head of the wife; not the wife of the husband.

But can a husband sue his wife if she refuses to support him out of her property, to give him her earnings, or keep her marriage contract? Not at all. Can a father sue his minor child that refuses him obedience and service? Not at all. And why is this? For the same reason that he cannot sue his flocks or his herds, his oxen and his cattle—they are his. His to command. He is responsible for and to them. He cannot sue his own. He can sue any one who takes them away; any one who keeps or harbors them; any one who injures them; because they are his own. But the wife does not own her husband; the child does not own the father, and, therefore, I hold that the child cannot sue for an injury to the father, nor the wife for an injury to the husband. There is in her no property right upon which to found the action. My conviction is that the wife looks to her husband alone for the fulfillment of his marriage vows. If he refuses her the support, protection and love which he pledged her, she applies to a court to enforce the claim against him. Every dollar he has, every penny of his earnings, all his arm can gain or his intellect can attain are subject to her right. But she looks to her husband alone, the law compels her to do so. The husband enforces his claim to his wife by striking down every one who interferes with his right to her. He holds her and dares the world to meddle with her. The law protects him in holding. The law gives courage to his heart, strength to his arm in defending his position. But the wife looks to the husband. She relies upon his pledge and his promise, which the law will enforce, and she looks to that alone. The law does not permit her to go forth to smite the seducer of her husband, nor the man or woman who entices him away.

But as showing the rapid growth of public opinion in favor of the wife’s equality of right with the husband, through the persistent rebellion of woman against established laws and usages of Church and States, thus forcing an advancing civilization upon the world, was a decision rendered 1891, twelve years later, in the state of Indiana. The case was that of Leah Haynes, plaintiff, against Flora Knowles, defendant; a suit similar in character to the “Lucy Walker Case.” Judge Elliot in Supreme Court of that State, on appeal from the decision of the Circuit Court of Dearborn County, reversed the finding of the lower court, deciding in favor of the right of a wife to sue for the alienation of her husband’s affections. This decision, so contrary to common law, and to ordinary christian legislation for woman, is proof of an advancing civilization which does not look to the church for approval. Court decisions of this character establishing a precedent, are of far greater value in demonstrating the growth of a purer public sentiment, than are simple legislative victories upon school or municipal questions. They speak even more clearly than do the host of newly opened industries, freer opportunities for education, married woman’s property laws and similar legislation, of a growing recognition of woman’s personal rights, and of a civilization founded upon the common rights of humanity, and no longer upon church authority.

The general spirit and letter of the christian laws of husband and wife was most fully carried out by a husband of the state of Missouri a few years since. Mrs. Olive Davenport of St. Louis, suing for a divorce, upon the ground that her husband required her to obey him in all things. “Davenport’s rules for his Wife” were offered in evidence.

Rules for the Government of my Wife’s Conduct while away from me, June 1, 1879:

First: Not to speak to any person or allow any person to speak to her on the car except the conductor and porter in the discharge of their duty.

Second: Go directly from depot in New York, to Mrs. Haight’s house, and occupy room with mother and sleep only in room.

Third: Speak kindly and politely to Mrs. Haight, but not in a friendly or familiar manner. Say to her you do not wish to meet any one in the house. Ask for a table to yourself, with only your family or go somewhere else.

Fourth: Never sing in the parlor or sing in your room when any person except your immediate family be present.

Fifth: Never leave mother day or night for five minutes at a time for any reason whatsoever. Do not walk, ride, or go anywhere without her, even with your own brother.

Sixth: Do not call on any person whatsoever, and allow no one who may call on you to see you unless they be your brothers or their wives. Do not speak to any person you may meet whom you have not known in the past.

Seventh: Write every night to me a full, truthful and exact account of everything you have done, where you have been, to whom you have spoken, and whom you have seen. This must be done every night.

Let nothing but sickness or death prevent your keeping these rules, for I will excuse no breach on any account.

Do not leave New York even for one hour without my permission, except to Brooklyn or Harlem.

If my wife cannot keep these rules in word and spirit, I desire never to see her again.

Benjamin R. Davenport.

The divorce suit showed the married pair to have been separated once before, Mrs. Davenport, unable to bear her husband’s tyranny, returning to her mother’s house. At that time her husband required her to eat only what he directed, and to wear only those clothes he bade her wear, selecting even the color of her ribbons. The only fault he had to find with her was that she “talked back,” which has always been deemed an unpardonable crime in woman; one for which the Ducking Stool and Scold’s Bridle were invented. After she left him, Mr. Davenport wrote affectionate letters to his wife, calling her the sweetest and best of women, imploring her to return. She relented and lived with him once more, but her husband again put his rules in force. She then sued for a divorce, which the court granted. Mr. Davenport’s treatment of his wife is by no means exceptional. The following excerpt is from a letter in the Terra Haute, Ind., Mail, 1884.

An individual who considers himself a representative man in the city, and perhaps he is, said in the presence of several persons. “I went home at three o’clock this morning and found my wife sitting up. She burst into tears and asked me where I had been and why I treated her in that manner? I just told her if she said another word I would leave the house; that as long as she had a comfortable home where she could spend her evenings it was none of her business where I spent mine. Now, if I did not provide for my family, it would be a different thing but so long as my wife is well provided for, she has no right to complain and I don’t propose to allow it.” These are the man’s own words, and there are a great many men who hold the same opinions. If their wives protest because they drink, gamble and spend their nights away, they say, “You have a good home and enough to eat and wear; what more do you want?”

A lady of Richmond, Va., anxious to know from a legal source just what her rights as a wife were, consulted a lawyer of that city.

“Well, Madam,” he replied, head thrown back, thumbs in armholes: “Well, Madam, you have a right to comfortable food; a fire to keep you warm, and two calico dresses a year. These are your legal rights; all beyond these are the gifts of your husband. Luxuries of food and clothing, journies and books, these are not yours by law; it remains with your husband to decide whether he will furnish them to you or not.”

And this is Christian civilization for woman at the close of the nineteenth century of this era.

Although married women of the State of New York have enjoyed certain property rights since 1848, subsequent legislation in various ways increasing that power, it was not until 1882, that the Court of Appeals decided them to be the rightful owners of articles of personal adornment and convenience coming from their husbands, possessing power to bequeath them at death to their heirs. The same year the Supreme Court of that state decided that a wife may sue her husband for damages for assault and battery. The influence of these decisions in recognizing woman’s rights of person, especially that of the Supreme Court in deciding the right of the wife to punish the husband through the courts for brutal treatment, can scarcely be overestimated. It opened a new era for woman:

First: A recognition of the wife’s personality.

Second: Holding the husband responsible for his treatment of the wife.

Third: An acknowledgement of the wife’s right to protection as against the husband. It destroyed, in this state the old femme covert teaching of Christianity, and recognized a wife as possessing the common rights of a human being.

The United States, making pretense of the greatest governmental freedom in the world, and in reality according it to men of every color and degree of intelligence or property, still denies such liberty to woman. In many of the states, the old restrictions of modern common law still prevail. There are states where the property of the wife upon marriage falls into the control of the husband, to do with as he alone pleases, the wife not retaining the right to its use or its management in any way whatsoever. There are other states where the separate property of the husband and the wife is made communal, but in those states the control of this communal property is in the husband’s hands. In most states the old restrictions still exist, and a woman cannot make a will; cannot act as executrix or administratrix; can neither sue nor be sued. In the largest proportion of the states in which the separate property of the wife is recognized, the husband still has the advantage in heirship. In less than one-fifth of the states has the wife the same control over the children of the marriage as the husband. In the remaining four-fifths and over, the father is assumed to be sole owner of the children, who can be bound out, willed or given away without the consent or even knowledge of the mother. Can barbarism go farther than this?

So that even in this year 1892, within eight years of the Twentieth Christian century, we find the largest proportion of the United States still giving to the husband custody of the wife’s person; the exclusive control of the children of the marriage; of the wife’s personal and real estate; the absolute right to her labor and all products of her industry. In no state does the law recognize the legal existence of the wife, unless she relinquishes her own name, upon marriage, taking that of her husband, thus sinking her identity in his; the old femme covert,—or covered woman,—idea of the law books under state and church. That woman is an individual with the right to her own separate existence, has not yet permeated the thought of church, state or society. A letter to the American press from Rev. Robert Laird Collyer, while re-visiting his native country a few years since, gives the unbiased views of a native-born English clergyman, as to woman’s position in that land of christian civilization, the husband being represented as king of the household, the wife as his dutiful subject. The letter was headed:

MARRIAGE CUSTOMS IN ENGLAND

The Man King of the House, the Woman His Dutiful Subject.

The man is the king of the English household, and the wife is only the prime minister. There is no confusion or overlapping of authority. The will of the husband is law. He has not only the place of honor but of ease. The arrangements of the house, the company entertained, and the service employed, all have respect to his wishes and to his convenience. The wife conducts the affairs of state for the king. She has her household and, more than likely, her personal allowance, and she renders a strict account of stewardship either weekly or monthly.

The wife’s personal expenditures are less, much less than the husband’s. In many instances he will spend more on his dress as a man than she does as a woman, for the rule is, the Englishman is the best-dressed man and the English woman is the worst dressed in the civilized world.

“The will of the husband is law,” the wife possessing no freedom, but renders “a strict account of her stewardship, either weekly or monthly.” Kicks, blows, wounds inflicted upon the wife under the countenance of the civil law; the will of the husband as undisputed law; her person, her property, her children under his sole control; what is the condition of the wife in England today but one of degraded slavery? That every woman does not endure all these wrongs is simply because she has a lenient master. Like Adolph under St. Clair, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she has freedom because a good master allows her to take it; under a bad master she suffers as Adolph when falling into the hands of Legree. Personal rights are the basis of all other rights; personal slavery is the root of all other wrongs. Neither freedom of the intellect or conscience can exist without freedom of person. Thus civilization has not yet existed, that which has borne the name having been but the thought of the few; the civilization of the present is not enlightened, it belongs to the barbarous ages; authority and not justice is the rule. To the present time the lenient sentence imposed upon the English husband who beats his wife is such as to invite a repetition of the offense; knocking a wife down, beating and bruising her with a poker are rights secured to the husband under present English law.

A man named Hefferon, at Rotherham, finding his wife had gone to some place of which he disapproved, knocked her down and beat her violently with a poker. She bled from both ears, her throat was scratched, and she was badly bruised on her back and arms. Mr. Justice Day practically told the jury to acquit. He said the case ought not to have come before them, and he suggested that the prisoner had been merely exercising that control over his wife which was still sanctioned by the law of England.[43] The jury acquitted promptly, as directed.[44]

To such extent is this abuse of woman under law as to have called forth a vigorous article in the Westminister Review,[45] under head of “The Law in Relation to Woman.”

There is another cruel injustice to woman, which is so notorious as to have become a mere truism. It is referred to almost daily, yet familiarity has bred such contempt, that it goes on unchecked and unabated. We refer to the monstrously lenient sentences passed upon husbands who assault and beat their wives. In one of our criminals courts recently, two men and a woman were sentenced to six years penal servitude for stealing a watch by force, while a man who assaulted and grievously wounded his wife and mother-in-law with a reaping hook, got eighteen months’ imprisonment. An instance occurred the other day in a small municipal court. A man pleaded guilty to assaulting and kicking his wife and another woman with effusion of blood and injury to their persons. He was fined a pound for each female. Shortly after two men were convicted of injuring public seats belonging to the municipality, by knocking them about, etc., they were fined two pounds each. Clearly, therefore, in the eyes of this magistrate a municipal seat is worth exactly twice the value of a woman. Parallel sentences to these may be seen almost daily in the newspapers in any part of the United Kingdom. In the police courts, wife-beaters often get off with a few days imprisonment, sometimes with an admonition. If it be argued that theft is such a common offense that it is necessary that it should be punished with greater severity than cruelty, we rejoice that the argument applies quite as forcibly to wife-beating, which, unfortunately is as common an offence as can be found among a certain class of society.[46]

The comparison here shown between the penalty of criminally assaulting and wounding women, not alone the man’s wife but also her aged mother, most forcibly shows the entire disregard of Christian England in the last half of the nineteenth century, for the personal rights of all women. No proof is needed other than such decisions; nor is the United States far in advance. Within ten months from the formation of the “Protective Agency for Women and Children,” organized in Chicago, April 1886, it had investigated nearly one hundred complaints. Although in a majority of these cases the agency was successful in securing redress, it yet found there was not legal remedy where the husband and father failed to provide for his family; and that in cases of crimes against women, its efforts were crippled by the disposition of police justices to regard such crimes as venial offenses, either dismissing such cases upon frivolous pretexts or imposing light sentences. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate women’s degraded condition in the nineteenth century of christian civilization, than the almost universal demand for laws securing better protection to women and children. These two classes, unrecognized by church or state, are still largely without that pale of protection man has reared for himself. January 23, 1886, the Inter Ocean, gave more than six columns to an account of the dreadful crimes committed against women and children in Chicago alone, within the short period of the preceding four months. It also showed the ease with which criminals of that class escaped punishment, not alone from laxity of protective legislation for their victims but still more from the tendency of magistrates to ignore crimes perpetrated by men against women; this condition being the natural result of the teaching of the church in regard to woman. In the city of Boston, 1884, the Chief of Police, testified that there were at least fifteen cases of brutal wife-beating in that city every week, and this is but one type of the injuries perpetrated upon women for which the teachings of christianity are directly responsible. So common this crime and so ineffective all efforts to stop it, that the State of Delaware has re-established the long abolished whipping-post, for offenders of this character, thus acknowledging christian civilization to be a failure, and resorting to the retributive punishment common among barbarians. But the remedy for crimes against women, and for the indifference of magistrates, does not lie in the punishment of the offenders, but in different sentiments in regard to woman in both church and state. Their teachings are the real foundations of the evil. Within the past ten years, the judge of an English Court decided that the flogging of a wife in the presence of her son did not constitute cruelty, sustaining his decision by reference to Blackstone and other learned christian jurists. It was during that same year (1884) that the chief of the Boston police testified to the many cases of brutal wife beating in that “Athens of America,” every week. So common this form of assault that a bill was introduced in the Massachusetts lower House for the punishment of wife beaters, by a public whipping of not less than ten or more than thirty lashes.[47] For those refractory wives of mediaeval christian England, whom whippings failed to subdue, other punishments were invented; such as the “Ducking Stool,” the “Scold’s Bridle,” etc.[48] The Scold’s Bridle, also known as the Witches Bridle and the Brank, was an extremely painful method of torture, although not as absolutely dangerous to life as the Ducking Stool, yet fastened in the mouth, its sharp edges pressing down upon the tongue, if the “Brawling Woman” attempted to speak her tongue was cut and the torture great.[49] An American clergyman describing in a public lecture an “ancient machine” seen by him in christian England, “for curing a scolding wife,” accompanied his description by the very clerical intimation that it could now be made by an ordinary blacksmith. Two curved plates of bronze conformed to the shape of the head, were delicately hinged and provided with hooks to place in the corners of the mouth. When adjusted, the machine was buckled back of the head.[50]

The Ducking Stool[51] consisted of a chair securely fastened upon a long plank balanced upon upright standards, and so arranged that the victim could be launched sixteen or eighteen feet into the pond or stream, while the executioner of the sentence stood upon dry ground. The back and arms of the chair were engraved with representations of devils torturing scolds. The culprit securely fastened in this chair, so confined as to be entirely helpless, was sometimes drowned; the chair being plunged once, twice, or thrice in some muddy stream or slimy pond. The suggestive and usual place of storing the Ducking Stool, when not in use, was the church-yard. Almost every English town of importance possessed one; their use was continued until the present century. The Leominster Ducking Stool, still preserved, was used in 1809, by order of the magistrates, upon a woman named Jane Corran, who received her punishment near Kenwater Bridge. As late as 1817 Sarah Leeke was wheeled around town in this chair, although the lowness of the stream prevented the ducking[52] she would otherwise have received. Railing and scolding or “answering back,” were deemed crimes on the part of the wife, who, “commanded to be under obedience,” was expected silently to submit to oppression of every kind. That she did not—that she dared revolt by words—that women in sufficient number to cause the invention of such an instrument, were rebellious in midst of the horrid oppression created by the church, speaks well for the womanly nature and thrills the heart with admiration the same as when old Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, refused to lay her head on the block at the executioner’s mandate, declaring that as she was innocent, she would not voluntarily place herself in position for death. While England has the shame of originating the Ducking Stool, the “Pilgrim Fathers,” fleeing from religious persecution, failed not to take with them the implements of cruelty used in the domestic oppression of woman. The Ducking Stool, and the “Stool of Penitence” figure in the early annals of New England. Upon the latter, the Scarlet Letter of shame affixed upon her breast, the unmarried mother was forcibly seated beneath the pulpit, under public gaze, while her companion in sin protected by church and state, perchance held his place among the elders in the jury box, or upon the bench as the judge who had condemned her. Old Colonial legislation makes us acquainted with the various methods in use for punishing the free speech of women in this country two hundred years since.

“A Law to Punish Babbling Women” enacted by the General Assembly, of Virginia, 1662.

Whereas, many babbling women slander and scandalize their neighbors, for which their poor husbands are often involved in chargable and vexatious suits and cost in great damages. Be it therefore enacted by the authority aforesaid, that in actions of slander caused by the wife, after judgment passed for damages, the wife shall be punished by ducking; and if the slander be so enormous as to be judged at greater damages than 500 lbs. of tobacco, then the wife to suffer ducking for each 500 pounds of tobacco adjudged against the husband, if he refuses to pay the tobacco.

As this was the state in which wives were bought in exchange for tobacco, it is not surprising to find the penalty of her free speech to be paid in tobacco, the wife to suffer ducking for each 500 pounds penalty in excess of the first. Massachusetts was not long in following the example of Virginia, and in 1672 ten years later, passed A Law for the Punishment of Scolds in Massachusetts.

Whereas, there is no express punishment (by law hitherto established) affixed to the evil practice of sundry persons by exhorbitancy of tongue in reviling and scolding; it is therefore ordered that all such persons convicted before any court or magistrate that hath proper cognizance of the case, shall be gagged, set in a ducking stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in some convenient place of fresh or salt water, as the court or magistrate shall judge meet.[53]

Nor must we believe that the punishment of women for use of the tongue, is of past ages. Even in the United States, women are to this day sometimes arraigned for free speaking. Laws to punish “babbling women” enacted in colonial days are still in force. It is but a few years since a woman of St. Louis was arrested and brought before a magistrate as a common scold.[54] In the State of New Jersey, 1884, a woman was brought before the courts, convicted, on the old grounds of being a “common scold” and fined $25, and costs. Death not infrequently accompanied the use of the ducking stool, the poor gagged victim, her hands securely fastened, being utterly unable to help herself. But we do not learn that either the magistrate or the husband was held responsible to the law for such death. The sufferers, like those under the catholic inquisition of the fourteenth century, were deemed outside of the pale of sympathy or human rights, and the devils depicted upon the back of ducking stools as laying hold of their victims, were conceded to have but taken their rightful prey.

Such has been part of Christian legislation for women in America, and yet she is told to see how much Christianity has done for her. To such extent has this church doctrine of man’s superiority to woman, and the right of the husband to control of the wife proceeded, that many husbands believe they possess the right to sell their wives. Since the reformation her sale in the market-place as an animal, held by a halter about her waist, has been recognized by English law even as late as the present century. Although now forbidden, the practice of wife-sale is still occasionally found both in England and in America. But when the law takes cognizance of such a sale its penalty is visited upon the innocent wife and not upon the guilty husband. The English Women’s Suffrage Journal of December 1st, 1883, reported such a case.

November 13th, 1883, Betsy Wardle, was indicted for having on the 4th of September, 1882, married George Chusmall, her former husband being alive. The prisoner pleaded guilty, but said her former husband gave her no peace and sold her for a quart of beer. She imagined this was a legal transaction, and that she could marry again. The second husband was asked how he came to marry the prisoner. He answered “Well, I bout her.” The judge said, “You are not fool enough to suppose you can buy another man’s wife?” on which he replied, “I was.”

Mr. Swift asked his lordship not to pass a severe sentence. The prisoner imagined that because she had been sold for sixpence there was nothing criminal in marrying again. His lordship said it was absolutely necessary to pass some punishment on her to teach her that a man had no more right to sell his own wife than his neighbor’s wife, or cow, or ox, or ass, or anything that was his.

The reason given by the judge for punishing the woman, is extremely suggestive of woman’s condition under the law. The wife who had been sold, the innocent victim of this masculine transaction, was sentenced to a week’s imprisonment with hard labor, while the man who sold her and the man who bought her escaped without punishment or censure. The judge in quoting the tenth commandment, graded the wife with the ox and the ass in the belongings of a man; the decision thus ranking her with the cattle of the stable.[55] To add to the infamy of the trial, it was the occasion of much unseemly jesting and laughter. It took place at the Liverpool Assizes before Justice Denham. His judgement paralleled the decision of the “Seney Trial” in Ohio, 1879. The selling a wife as a cow[56] in the market place was by no means uncommon during the early part of the century in England. Ashton[57] give numerous instances of such sales.

The laws of England are those of Christianity based upon the theological teaching of man’s superiority over woman; she is his servant, subordinate to him in all things, a condition except where removed by special statute, existing today.[58] Returned missionaries who refer to the wife as waiting upon the husband at table in heathen countries not eating until he is satisfied, as proof of the different customs brought about by christianity, should inform themselves of the condition of the christian wife for nearly a thousand years in what is regarded as the foremost christian country in the world. He will then have learned that circumstances quite contradictory to ecclesiasticism finally permitted the English wife to assume a seat at the table with her husband, a place she was not allowed to take for many hundred years after the introduction of christianity into that island. In every country where christianity exists, women now are, and during all the years of its civil power have been, legislated for as slaves. They have been imprisoned for crimes which if committed by a man were punished by simply branding on the hand; they have been condemned to be buried alive for other crimes which if committed by a man, were atoned for by the payment of a fine. Having first robbed woman of her property and denied her the control of her own earnings, the christian religion allowed her to suffer the most agonizing form of death, a living burial, for lack of that very money of which she had been civilly and ecclesiastically robbed. The law so far controlled family life that for many hundred years it bound to servile labor, all unmarried women between the ages of eleven and forty. The father possessed absolute control over the marital destiny of his daughter.

Instances of wife sale are not uncommon in the United States, and although the price is usually higher than that given for English wives, reaching from three hundred to four thousand dollars, still, as low a sum as five cents has been recorded. A prosperous resident of Black Hills, Dakota, is said to have begun his business start in life through sale of his wife. If a wife is a husband’s property the same as a cow, it is manifestly unjust that legal punishment of any kind should fall upon her because of her master’s action. She is irresponsible. The right of sale logically goes with the right of beating, of taking the wife’s property and holding her earnings, of owning her children and she should be exempt from punishment for her own sale. In a much larger measure we find the same rule of punishing wives for the crimes of husbands, enforced in the United States, in the penalty of disfranchisement of the women of Utah for the polygamy of the men of Utah. And this penalty was extended not alone to the wives of polygamous husbands—themselves possessing but one husband—victims alike of church and state, but the non-Mormon or “Gentile Women” of that territory, were also disfranchised by the XLIX Congress of the United States because of the polygamy of a portion of the Mormon men; all women of that territory were deprived of their vested rights, rights that had been in existence for seventeen years, because of the crimes of men.[59] Against this injustice, the Woman Suffragists of the country protested through means of a committee in a

MEMORIAL.

To the President of the United States:

The National Woman Suffrage Association, through this committee, respectfully present to you a protest against that clause of the anti-polygamy measure passed by congress, which, whether in the Edmunds bill of the senate or the Tucker substitute of the house, disfranchises the non-polygamous women of Utah.

The clause relating to the disfranchisement of women has no bearing on the general merits of the end sought to be attained by the measure, since Mormon men are the majority of the voters of the territory.

The non-polygamous women of Utah have committed no crime. Disfranchisement is reserved by the United States government for arch traitors. Justice forbids that such a penalty should be inflicted on innocent women.

Non-polygamous Mormon women and the Christian women of Utah being thus disfranchised—the former for their opinions and the latter for the opinions of the former—a precedent is established subversive of the fundamental principles of our government, and threatening the security of all citizens.

If congress deems it necessary to disfranchise citizens because of injurious beliefs, discrimination between sexes is manifestly unjust.

It has been held by the foremost statesmen of the nation that the right of suffrage once exercised, becomes a vested right which cannot be taken away. Gratz Brown once said, in the senate of the United States, that if the idea that suffrage could be taken away at pleasure once crystallized in the minds of the people, it would “ring the death knell of American liberty.” Mr. Vest, of Missouri, on the 25th day of this month, said, on the floor of the senate: “Suffrage once given can never be taken away. Legislatures and conventions may do everything else; they never can do that. When any particular class or fraction of the community is once invested with this privilege it is fixed, accomplished and eternal.”

Thus every argument for justice, equal legislation and the safety of our republican form of government calls for the defeat of this clause.

We, therefore, respectfully urge you, as guardian of the rights of all American citizens, to veto any measure coming before you which disfranchises the women of Utah.

Lillie Devereux Blake,
Matilda Joslyn Gage,
Caroline Gilkey Rogers,
Mary Seymour Howell,
Clara B. Colby,
Sarah Miller,
Elizabeth Boynton Harbert,
Harriette R. Shattuck,
Louisa Southworth,
Committee

This memorial, supplemented by personal argument from the committee demonstrating the political dangers connected with such a denial of vested rights, together with the greater injustice of punishing women for the crimes of men, was met by reply of the President that as great changes were frequently made in bills before their final passage, he had as yet not given the subject much thought; promising, however to give it his fullest attention whenever brought before him. The method taken by the president to avoid responsibility of decision, is notable as he neither signed nor vetoed the bill, but allowed it to become law through such non-action. Crimes of omission being parallel with those of commission, the women of the United States can but hold Grover Cleveland equally guilty with the XLIX Congress in punishing women for the crimes of men.

The Code of England, from which that of the United States is largely borrowed, was the outgrowth of Christianity, based upon a belief in man’s superiority and woman’s subordination to him as entering every relation of life. All legislation was class; the line was sex. During the early and middle ages man exhibited an antagonism towards woman,[60] which if not wholly created by religious belief was strenuously fostered by the church. Man’s basest passion, love of power, was appealed to and he was assured by what he had been trained to regard as indisputable authority, that God had ordained his rule over woman. A quick response met all such priestly teaching. Christianity has ever been a religion of the emotions rather than of the reason. The former was cultivated; the latter bitterly condemned. The church has ever found its most powerful enemy in reason, hence the exercise of reason has ever been a crime in her eyes.

During the Christian ages the different code of morals for man and woman has created infinite wrong. Open and notorious vice among both churchmen and laymen passed unreproved, but an heiress forfeited her possessions by unchastity, and wily plans were laid to thus gain possession of her property, the betrayer receiving payment from the guardian, whose tool he was, for his perfidy.[61] To this moral code we trace the present legal condition of girls, daughters having no status in the courts in case of betrayal. The father alone, as master and owner, can sue for loss of her services, while the injury to herself is passed by, even upon so momentous a question as the paternity of a child born out of wedlock.

Many of the most flagrant wrongs perpetrated against woman can be traced to a denial of a right of ownership, beginning with the denial of her right to herself. Even the Salic law which in France was used to bar the succession of woman to the throne, was not specifically or primarily in favor of males; it was a property law growing out of the patriarchal idea of property in woman. Under Christian form of marriage, woman was transferred to another family whose name she took. She not only became the property of her husband but all real or personal estate which she possessed, also became his. Thus her property went to the enrichment of another family. Her home was no longer with her own people, but where her husband chose to make it. Salic law derived its name from Sala, a house. Salic land, said Montesquieu, was the land belonging to the house.[62] At time of its adoption the line of descent was male. Under it during the middle ages when a daughter married, she received merely a chaplet of roses. Thenceforth, her interests were elsewhere, and her children became part of another family; she was entirely lost to the family of her birth. As she was no longer a part of it she did not receive inheritance. “It was not a subject of affection but gens.”

Guizot with a fine sense of irony, termed Salic law essentially a penal code. Its application to woman was incontestibly penal. In France its action has been most pronounced. Robertson speaks of the Salic law as the most venerable monument of French jurisprudence, although the real period of its birth has never yet been fully acknowledged. While during the struggle of Phillippa de Valours, and Edward III for the crown of France, this law was invoked to prevent the succession of Phillippa, yet we know that in Gaul during the time of Caesar, mothers had sole authority over their children, even boys remaining in entire charge of the mother until old enough for instruction in arms. Wives also possessed property rights, upon marriage the husband adding the same amount of property he had received with his wife. This was kept as a separate fund, the survivor taking the whole. Hallum designated the contest between Phillippa and Edward as in every way remarkable, but especially on account of its result in the exclusion of woman from the succession,[63] then first suggested. It was the Latin races rather than the Scandinavian or Teutonic that first essentially degraded woman. The Riparian Franks, pre-eminent as lovers of liberty, were the first who broke away from the rule of this law. Both the Scandinavians and Teutons possessed prophetic women or priestesses to whom the highest deference was shown. The Teutonic races were early noted for the high respect in which they held women, a respect closely bordering upon veneration. The greatest deference was shown to their opinions even upon war, the chief business of men’s lives. Victoria received the title of “Mother of Camps,” and was an especially venerated person. Veleda by superior genius, directed the counsels of the nation and for nine years prevented the progress of the imperial armies of Rome. The most momentous questions of state and of religion were submitted to woman’s divine judgment.

The relation between the wrongs of woman and her non-ownership of property, and of herself, are very complicated. The custom of Marquette originated from the theory of property in woman; the Suzerain or lord possessing not only a certain property right in his male vassals, but a double right to the woman who as a bride became the property of his vassal. Thus Marquette was the outgrowth of the husband’s property right in his wife, and a secondary result of man’s assumed right of property in woman. In France, where the Salic law possessed greatest strength we find the custom of marquette most prevalent. Next to marquette, the law known as “Mund” or “Mundium” offered the greatest indignity to woman, and in some respects may be called more vile. While the baseness of marquette took its victims from a class beneath the lord in social standing, Mundium entered the family, the father selling his daughter to such wooer as he chose, or from whom he received the greatest payment, entirely regardless of the wishes of the daughter herself. The Salic law seemed to have been founded on the principle of the Mund, as under it a sum was paid by the husband to the family of the bride in consideration of the transference of the authority they possessed over her, to the husband, and this payment was known as “Mundium” and the bride as a “Mund” bought woman. In Denmark, to which country the custom of mundium extended, her appellation was “mundikeypt-krom,” signifying a mund bought woman. At that period descent was reckoned from the father, to whom alone the children were held to be related, and his relinquishment of authority by sale of his daughter, transferred her relationship from her father to her husband, and she thus became a component part of another family. She no longer belonged to the family of her birth, but to that of her purchaser. The Franks were the first to break Salic customs and to permit a father to settle an estate upon his daughter and her children.[64] Under the law of Gavelkind as it existed in Great Britain, daughters never inherited, although the rights of even an illegitimate son was recognized as equal to those of legitimate sons. By the laws of gavelkind, property could not descend to women, but the County of Kent possessed more freedom than in any other part of England. There was a custom of privilege annexed to all lands of this kind in Kent, among them, that the wife should be endowed with a moiety; gavelkind land was devisable by will. Ordinarily in gavelkind, property was kept in male hands, descending from father to son. The very name gavelkind is said to bear this signification, the word Kynd is dutch signifying a male child, thus gife eal cyn, means give all to the son. Its modern signification is the custom of partition of property among males alone, or the greatest share to the oldest son.

Lord Coke looked upon the practice of gavelkind among the Irish as a mark of their descent from the ancient Britons. At this period wives were not entitled to dower, thus in respect to property, all women of the family were equally disinherited. But it was the opinion of Lord Holt that by the Common Law, both before and after the conquest, all the children, both male and female inherited both the real and the personal estate, and in like proportion. But in the reign of Henry I daughters, in case there were sons, began to be excluded from the real estate. These laws, so essentially Salic, it can readily be seen, originated in the mundium. Passing as a mund woman, into another family, the succession of property to her under this slave[65] condition, was contrary to sound domestic policy. To bestow property upon a daughter was to enrich another family at the expense of the one from whom the slave-wife was purchased, and her disinheritance was but a logical result of her legal condition. If we admit the premises we must admit the wisdom of her exclusion from succession.

It is curious to note the difference in woman’s position which possession of property has ever made. This difference especially noticeable during Feudalism in case of an heiress with fiefs, is no less so at the present day. It is a mark of an unripe civilization that the rights of property have ever been regarded before those of person. Walker[66] over sixty years since, recognized the power of property in ameliorating woman’s condition, then declaring that the first step toward an acknowledgment of her equality, must be a recognition of her rights of property; his broad knowledge of ancient law having taught him the close connection of property rights and personal rights. During many ages battle was done for possessions and the protection of what a man owned. Even the war of the American Revolution was begun for property rights rather than for those of person. The Stamp Act and the tax on tea roused the Colonies to resistance. A woman first spoke the words “inherent rights,” and by the time nationality was proclaimed the colonists had learned far enough to say that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent is an important consideration in all questions affecting humanity, and is one in which woman is most deeply concerned. At close of the civil war Frederick Douglass advised colored men to get property. He had not failed to learn the connection between property and personal rights. Since Mississippi, in 1839,[67] Pennsylvania and New York in 1848, and Rhode Island about the same period, secured property rights to married women, there has been a great and rapidly increasing change in woman’s position, and as she constantly enters new industries, earning and controlling money, we find her as constantly more free and respected. When the English “Married Women’s Property Bill,” based upon that of New York, became a law a few years since, the London Times, with the perspicuity of our great thinker, Walker, said:

It probably portends indirect social effects much greater than the disposition of property, and it may in the end pulverize some ideas which have been at the basis of English life. Measures which affect the family economy are apt to be “epoch making”; and probably when the most talked of bills of the session are clean forgotten this obscure measure may be bearing fruit.

The exception of married women in the demand for political rights by the women of England, owes its origin to the old monkish theory that marriage is debasement, and celibate life in either man or woman a much higher condition. After the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, during the civil war, John Stuart Mill declared that married women were the only class of slaves remaining on earth. As long as a condition of religious or political subjection continues for her, a belief in the sanctity of womanhood cannot exist and crimes against her will be lightly punished. The most debased men of England and the United States, if arrested for cruelty to wives, agree in the indignant questioning protest: “Is she not my own that I should punish her as I please?”

Such has been the power of the priesthood over the consciences and lives of men, that we find whatever is bad in the laws either directly or indirectly traceable to their influence.[68] Our Anglo Saxon forefathers were early amenable to religious authority and for a period of many hundred years clerical influence was exceedingly powerful over them.[69] The church is responsible for the severity with which the simplest infraction of law was visited upon the most humble and helpless classes, and the greater penalty awarded to those least capable of resistance. It was for the free man of low estate, for the slave, and for woman that the greatest atrocities were reserved. If a free woman stole she was to be thrown down a precipice or drowned, which Pike regards as the origin of dragging witches through a pond. If the thief was a slave and stole from any but her own master, she was condemned to be burnt alive, and her fellow slaves were compelled to assist at the incineration.[70] None dared to speak a good word for women in opposition to church teachings. All her instincts were held as evil. As the law and the father robbed the daughter, so the law and the church alike robbed the family. By ancient English law, as before noted, every person who made a will was bound to remember his lord with the best thing he possessed, and afterwards the church with the next best thing, but as the church gained power it took supreme place in the testament.[71] The peasant was looked upon as but slightly above the cattle he cared for. A certain degree of sameness in material and intellectual conditions everywhere existed. The masses over christendom were alike under bondage of the thought and modes of action; social life showed no marked change for many hundred years. Freedom was an unknown word, or if by chance spoken, found itself under the ban of the church and the state. Justice was unthought of; the only question being, “has the church ordered it?” A complete system of espionage existed under both church and state. As late as the time of Alfred, in England, every nine men were under charge of a tenth. No man could work outside of his father’s employment to which he was bound; at nine o’clock curfew bell, all fires and lights were extinguished. A mechanic could not find work outside of his own village; monasteries and castles contained all there was of power and comfort. As late as the reformation we find the condition of English society lax and immoral. Henry the VIII was a fair type of the nation; the court, the camp, the church were all in line moulding the sentiment of community. Although Henry had declared the church to be an entire and perfect body within itself, possessing authority to regulate and decide all things without dependence upon any foreign power—meaning the pope,—he did not fail to generally define the supremacy of the church as united with and dependent upon the temporal government of the realm; the king, instead of the pope, becoming its spiritual head. Many new and restrictive canons were promulgated. Under Henry the prohibitory laws regarding nearness of relationship in marriage exceeded those of the Catholic Church. It is but a few decades since these prohibitions commencing with “a man shall not marry his grand-mother;” “a woman shall not marry her grand-father;” and extending down to remote cousinship,—were to be found printed upon the fly leaves of every New Testament.[72]

For a long period after the reformation, English women were not permitted to read the Bible, a statute of the Eighth Henry prohibiting “women and others of low degree,” from its use.[73] Apparently for the purpose of preventing conversation among women regarding the tyranny under which they were kept, a law was passed forbidding the residence of more than one woman in a cottage, and this after the Protestant religion had been confirmed as that of the realm. As late as Elizabeth, 31-2, it was held a “heinous offence” for a cottager to give a home to his own widowed mother or homeless sister. The especial criminality of thus “harboring” one’s female relatives lay in the fact of their being “masterless.” As late as the XVI century the law still entered houses, and magistrates bound out to servile labor all women between eleven and forty years of age.[74] The degradation of women under the reformation was still more gross than under catholicism. The worship of the Virgin Mary, and the canonization of many women as saints in the Romish Calendar, threw a certain halo about womankind that is impossible to discover in the Protestant Church, or since the reformation.

The church of whatever name taught woman’s innate depravity was so great that forcible restraint alone prevented her from plunging into vice. While Christian women outside the Levant were not confined in a harem under watch and ward, yet various methods of restraint have been used in christian lands within the past few centuries. Among the most noted of these, the “Chastity Belt,” three are yet known to be in existence. One is preserved in the museum at Cluny, France, another is in keeping of the Castle of Rosenburg, Copenhagen; the third was exhibited in the United States, 1884, by Dr. Heidmann’s traveling museum. According to tradition the one persevered at Cluny was in use during the XVI Century, in reign of Francis I, who ascended the throne January 1, 1515; the remaining two in Denmark under Christian IV in the seventeenth century. At this period Denmark was greatly agitated by a religious war, which however, did not include woman’s freedom in its demands. These belts are hideous proofs of the low estimate in which woman’s moral character was held, and equally striking evidence of man’s freedom and immorality.

The disrespect shown by the clergy towards marriage as compared with the celibate condition, has influenced thought in many singular directions. England’s married women under the combined influence of church and state deprecate the claim of suffrage for themselves, although asking it for single women and widows.[75]

The bill referred to in the Memorial, 49 Vic., extended Parliamentary franchise to single women alone.

The word “coverture” expresses a married woman’s subordinate condition, both civilly and religiously.[76] It means, under the power of the husband; controlled by the husband; possessing neither personal nor individual rights; a being not allowed to use her own judgment unless such judgment is ratified by the husband. Under coverture, the wife can make no contract without the husband’s consent, the law holding her incompetent. A woman under coverture is an irresponsible being except in case of crime. When married women refuse to seek the same freedom for themselves they ask for single women, they practically endorse the judgment of church and state in favor of celibacy. When married women thus ignore their equality with single women, they practically condemn that relation, practically affirm the superior purity of a celibate condition.[77] The low estimate of women in England as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is shown in its literature, especially that emanating from its great universities. The betrayal of women formed the basis of story and song; not content with portraying their own vices, these men did not hesitate to put a plea against chastity in the mouths of mere children. Of such character is “A Ballad” emanating from this source, but professing to have been “composed by Miss Nelly Pentwenzle, a young lady of 15,” to be sung to the tune of “Scraps of Pudding.”

A periodical entitled The Old Woman’s Magazine printed in London, without date, but from internal evidence shown to belong to the latter part of the eighteenth century, forcibly protests against the destruction of innocence, which was the chief amusement of the men of this period. It asks:

Thus the laws and customs of family and social life, the literature of different periods, the habits of thought, the entire civilization of christian centuries, has tended to the debasement of woman and the consequent destruction of moral life. The world stands where it does today upon all these great questions, biased by a non-recognition through the ages of the sanctity of womanhood, and a disbelief in her rights of person within the marriage relation, or without; taught, as this lesson has been, by the church, and emphasized by the laws of the state.

There have ever been many severities connected with dower in England. By old law if a widow married within a year from the death of her husband she forfeited her dower.[78] This law accounts for the superstitious sentiment as to ill-luck following the woman who re-marries within a year and a day. Like the freedom of the Roman “Usus” kept up by a three days’ absence in each year, this extra day of the widow’s mourning seems to have been added as security for the dower; while under the most ancient law of christian Europe, the widow lost her dower if she married again, the Turks recognizing the greater freedom of a widow, pay her who re-marries, a sum for parting with her liberty.

The general rule of dower[79] held that when arranged at time of marriage, although the husband then possessed but a small portion of freehold and afterwards made great acquisitions, if no mention of new purchases was made at time of such arrangement, the widow could not claim more than the third part of the land possessed by the husband at time of marriage. In like manner if a husband had no land and endowed his wife with chattels, money, or other things, afterwards making great acquisitions in land, she could not claim dower in such acquisition. Neither could a woman dispose of her dower during her husband’s life. This was quite unlike the freedom enjoyed by a wife in ancient Wales where the dower became absolutely her own, to dispose of as she pleased. Under English law the husband during the lifetime of his wife could give or sell or alien her dower in any way that it pleased him to do, and the wife in this, as in all other things, was obliged to conform to the husband’s will. The wife’s dower right in personal property can be aliened by the husband in the United States. During the wife’s lifetime he may give, sell, or in any way dispose of the whole of his personal property absolutely, and the wife has no redress; she is not held as having any right, title or interest in it as long as her husband lives.[80] The husband can also alien his real estate, subject only to his wife’s dower right in case she survive him; should she decease before him she has no power over it. The law in England as laid down by Glanville was that in case the wife withheld her consent to the sale of property she might claim her dower after her husband’s death, but this could only have had reference to real property, and is the same in the United States. If the wife withholds her consent to the sale of real estate, it still can be sold away from her and she thus be deprived of a home. It is merely subject to her dower right in the value of the property at time of sale, and in case she survives her husband; should she die first, she has no redress. Sales of this character are constantly made, at a small discount, upon chance of the wife’s nonsurvival. As dower right in real estate does not invest the wife with its ownership in fee, but merely the use of one-third during her natural life, it will readily be seen how very small is the wife’s protection in dower-right even in this last half of the nineteenth century. Bracton gives two reasons why the English husband could sell the dower assigned to the wife without her consent:

As late as the last quarter of the present century, the learned Professor of Jurisprudence of Cambridge University, attempted to prove that it was no reproach against woman’s intellect that she was prohibited from making a contract during marriage; although failing in this attempt, he clearly succeeded in proving woman’s condition of pecuniary and personal slavery in the marriage relation. He said:

The legal presumption that the wife has neither sufficient command of her purse or of her future actions to guarantee an intent of making a contract, needs no further assertion to prove her enslavement. The person neither possessing control of property or of their own actions is a slave, regardless of or under what verbiage of law or custom that condition is represented. Attempts are constantly made both in the United States and England to take from woman the dower right now accruing to them. During 1883, an Act was passed taking from English wives all dower right, giving the husband power to bar the wife in all cases; and scarcely a legislature convenes in the United States that has not a similar bill introduced before it. As dower rights increase the complication of land transfer, just as soon as the law which gave the husband the power to bar this right became operative in England, conveyancers began to insert a debaring clause in every deed of conveyance, thus systematically despoiling the wife even when the husband might not otherwise have been so disposed.

As “masterless women,” widows in England have received similar contemptuous treatment as accorded single women, to whom that country long showed such barbarity. It is curiously noted by Alexander[82] that Moses placed widows in the same rank as harlots and profane women.[83] The law of tenancy by courtesy, which gives a husband rights in the separate property of a wife, is very unjust when compared with the dower rights of a wife. In such case, provided she has borne a living child, even should such child breathe but once, the husband in case of the death of his wife, holds the entire real estate during his life, as “tenant by courtesy.” He also takes the whole of her personal property absolutely, to dispose of as he chooses. In a few of the United States, the wife can defeat this by will, but in the large majority of christian lands, the full rights “of tenancy by the courtesy,” still prevail. Where right of dower still prevails, the wife if there are children, takes but one-third of the personal property absolutely, one-half if there are no children, the rest passing to collateral heirs, who may be the husband’s most distant relatives. In case no such relative can be found, the balance escheats to the state, although in the State of New York the widow, under such circumstances, receives $2,000 over one half. Of the real property she has the use of but one-third, in contradistinction to the use of the whole of her real property, which goes to the husband by “tenancy of courtesy.” In tenancy by courtesy the children are robbed of the mother’s real estate during the life of the father, and of her personal property, forever. In enacting property laws, man, under tenancy by courtesy robs his own children. The law of inheritance in Spain, that country distinguished among European nations as “Most Christian land,” compels a man to leave four-fifths of his property to his children, but does not make it obligatory upon him to endow his wife with the remaining fifth. Neither has the wife a dower right in property owned by her husband at time of the marriage. The suite of a Spanish widow for dower right, in an estate of several millions left by her deceased husband, was fully reported by the New York daily papers within the past five years. Suddenly reduced from affluence as the wife of this man, to the most abject poverty as his widow, this wife and mother brought suit against the estate and her children, who receiving all the property by the husband’s will, left her absolutely beggared.

In ancient Ireland, the condition of woman was far superior to that of the christian women of England or Scotland. Two forms of marriage existed. Under that of “Equal Dignity,” the rights of the contracting parties were the same, and took place when the man and woman possessed the same amount of land, cattle, or household goods. No force or sale accompanied it, the woman giving free consent equally with the man. This marriage was looked upon as a contract between equals. The property of the wife did not revert to the husband. She retained its control, loaning it and receiving interest entirely free from the interference of her husband.[84] Ancient Irish law, also secured to the mother equal authority with the father over the children of the marriage. There is no trace of that arbitrary control over both wife and children with which Christianity endowed the father.[85] The daughter was held to be more closely related to the father; a son to the mother, this belief contributing an equality of right between the sexes. These laws were authoritative over the whole of Ireland until the invasion of the Danes, in the eight century (A.D. 792).

It is remarkable what effect the ownership of property by woman has ever had in ameliorating her legal condition. Even in ancient Ireland the wife without possessions became the slave of her husband. Although the son was held as more nearly related to his mother, this ancient code provided that in case his parents were poor and he had not wealth enough to support both father and mother, he was to leave the latter to die in the ditch, but was to carry his father back to his own home.[86] Tradition ascribes this code to St. Patrick in the fifth century. Under modern christian law, the legal obligation of a son to support his father is greater than it is to support his mother, quite in opposition to the old Scandinavian (pagan) law, which provided for the support of the mother if but one parent could be cared for. Not the least among the wrongs inflicted upon Ireland by English usurpation, has been the destruction of the wife’s rights of property. The right of the Irish wife to deal with her own property as she chose, irrespective of her husband’s consent, was expressly declared illegal by English judges at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

There are traces of separate property rights for woman, early among Aryan peoples. By the old laws of Wales, a wife became legal owner of part of her husband’s effects immediately upon marrying him, and had the sole disposal of this portion even during her husband’s life. Debt owed by a husband to a wife was as binding on him and his heirs and executors as a debt to any other person. After the English laws were introduced into Wales, innumerable disputes arose upon this ground. The Welsh woman being persistent in her determination to cling to her old rights, and for nearly two hundred years her will upon this subject was stronger than the will of English legislators, as proven by legal records.[87] In other respects the ancient law of Wales favored woman. A husband’s fetid breath was held as good cause for divorce on part of the wife, who in such case took with her the whole of her property. While still living with her husband, the Welsh wife possessed the right to three kinds of property, cowyll, gowyn, and sarand, known as her three peculiars.[88] Old Welsh law was unique in that it forbade both satisfaction and vengeance for the same wrong. Even if detecting his wife in adultery, for which he should chastise her, the husband was forbidden any satisfaction besides that. In case of an illegitimate birth the law provided that the man should wholly maintain the child,[89] a species of justice not found under Christianity. The laws of “Howell the Good,” enacted at a later date under the supervision of the church[90] favored the man at the woman’s expense. Under these laws if a husband and wife separated, the father took two-thirds of the children, the oldest and the youngest falling to his share, while the middle one fell to the mother. A woman was not admitted as surety, or as a witness in matters concerning a man.[91] In the division of property the daughters received only one half the amount given to the sons.

Under the christian laws of England, by which the property of a married woman passed entirely into the control of her husband, the abduction of heiresses in that country was very common for many hundred years, no punishment following such a theft, although the most compulsory measures were used, even to forcibly bending the bride’s head in affirmative response during the marriage ceremony. She was a woman; the law furnished her no redress. It regarded her as the legal wife of her abductor, to whom she thereafter under this christian law, owed service and obedience. The sole right to her person, her property, her children then becoming legally invested in the robber husband. As noted in the opening chapter, the abduction of a woman, or even an immodest proposal to her, was punished in older un-christianized Scandinavia, by greater or lesser outlawry; rape being a capital crime, placing the culprit’s life in the hands of any man. He was outside the pale of law.

France under frequent changing names and forms of government, and with a broader general recognition each year of human rights, is yet very closely allied to the barbarism of the middle ages in its treatment of woman, and its conception of her natural rights. This was shown even during the revolution of 1787, of which Madame Roland and Charlotte Corday were such central heroic figures. Although this revolution established an equal succession between sons and daughters, yet it did not tolerate the proposition of Sieyes and Condorcet that woman should be endowed with the suffrage. One hundred years later, in 1887, a bill was introduced during the legislative session, to secure to woman the same political rights accorded man. This bill was lost; “Le Gaulois,” commenting upon it, declared that in whatever manner the question was discussed, it appeared grotesque and ridiculous. In the Legislative Assembly of 1851, M. Chapot, proposed the prohibition of the right of petition to women upon all subjects of a political nature. During the same session, Athenase Coquerel, the most distinguished member of a Protestant family of clergymen, presented a bill to the Chambers excluding women from political clubs. Woman’s testimony is not accepted in regard to civil acts. They cannot attest to a birth or a death, nor is their testimony admitted in the identification of persons. Neither can they become members of the family council, nor are they accepted as guardians of their own children. It is only since 1886 that their condition has been in any way ameliorated. The re-marriage of widows is forbidden under ten months after the husband’s death, and until within the last decade, divorces were of great rarity. The oppressed condition of woman in the marriage relation, was notably shown by the vast number of applications for release from the hated bond upon the passage of the new law; a number so great,—eleven thousand,—that two years scarcely sufficed to reach them all. No stronger argument against the evils of an indissoluble marriage is required, and as the greater number of applicants were women, it is farther evidence of woman’s degradation under christian marriage laws.

According to the famous Code Napoleon, accepted by France as her modern system of jurisprudence and declared (by man) to be nearly perfect in its provisions, every child born outside of wedlock is deemed to be fatherless unless such father of his own free will formally acknowledges his offspring. While fifty per cent of all children born in Paris are illegitimate, statistics prove that such acknowledgement takes place but once in fifty births. Thus forty-nine per cent of Parisian children under the Code Napoleon, theoretically come into the world without fathers—they are born fatherless. A still more heinous provision of this Code, forbids all research into paternity.[92] The father of an illegitimate child—rendered illegitimate by church canons—is held as both morally and legally irresponsible for his fatherhood. Under this Code, upon the mother falls all the contumely associated with such birth, together with the care and expense of rearing the child. We cannot be surprised at the prevalence of infanticide, a crime resulting from such unjust legislation, and for which the church is directly responsible. In the whole history of French jurisprudence, not a single case can be found where the father of an illegitimate child has been compelled to acknowledge his off-spring.[93] Under French law, woman is a perpetual minor under the guardianship of her own, or that of her husband’s family. Only in case of the birth of an illegitimate child is she treated as a responsible being, and then only that discomfort and punishment may fall upon her. The same legal degradation of the unmarried mother, the same protection accorded the unmarried father, the same enticement of the law for man to assume a fatherhood freeing him from accountability, the same covert contempt of womanhood and of motherhood, also exists in Italy, its penal code forbidding all research into paternity. And this is not the legislation of the middle ages but of the nineteenth century.

But French disregard for the rights of woman, as already shown, far preceded the Code Napoleon; that system but legally emphasized the low estimate of the feminine we have traced through the Salic, Feudal, and Witchcraft periods. Louis VII referring to the number of girls born in his dominions, requested his subjects to pray unto God that he should accord them children of the better sex. Upon the birth of his first child, Margaret, who afterwards married Henry Courtmantel of England, his anger was so great that he would not look at her; he even refused to see his wife. He afterwards accorded an annual pension of three livres, the archaic French currency?-P1] to the woman who first announced to him the birth of a son. Although five hundred years have passed since the graphic portrayal of woman’s condition, in the ballad of the Baron of Jauioz, we find the Breton farmer whose wife has given birth to a daughter, still saying, “my wife has had a miscarriage.” Question an ordinary French peasant in regard to his family and the father of girls alone, he will reply, “I have no children, sir, I have only daughters.”[94]

During the feudal period parents gave themselves up to merry-making and rejoicing upon the marriage of the last of their daughters.[95] Even yet, in some countries, the birth of a boy is announced by a servant wearing a white apron and carrying two bouquets in her hand; if a girl she carries but one; in some countries the father of a boy annually received the gift of two loads of wood from the state; but a single one if the child was a girl. Even in the United States we yet see this contempt of the feminine variously manifested, although the kindness and affection of girls to their parents, is usually more notable, than that of boys.[96] Family regard is usually manifested in the descending, rather than the ascending line, yet Herbert Spencer declares that full civilization is dependent upon the respect and affection shown to parents. France is not the only christian land that invalidates a woman’s testimony, receiving the assertion of the woman with less authority than the denial of the man. In Scotland in case of an illegitimate birth, the accused man is allowed to clear himself upon oath, in opposition to that of the woman. Under Scottish law the child born outside of marriage was formerly compelled to do penance in church for the sins of his parents. Such has been the justice of christianity to women and children during the ages. These methods of christianity were in great contrast to those of heathendom. The early Anglo-Saxon (pagan) laws contained provisions for the punishment of assaults upon women. Crimes against her were punished by greater or less outlawry according to the attendant circumstances. Old Scandinavia possessed many laws for the protection of woman. It has sometimes been asserted that these laws were a dead letter, so many instances of loose connections are recorded in the Iceland Sagas. It is, however, a question of fact that these illegal relations, according to the same Sagas were much more frequent after the introduction of christianity than before.[97] Roman law presumed that no woman went astray without the seduction and arts of the other sex, upon whom alone the punishment fell. Under old Saxon, Gothic and Scandinavian law, rape was punished by death. Under the Conqueror, its punishment was castration and loss of the eyes, which continued English law until after Bracton wrote in time of Henry III. A lighter punishment then superseded it, but the effects of this leniency was so evil the old penalty was restored. While forbidding woman control of her own property, common law, under one of those anomalous renderings which mark the constant injustice of Church and State towards woman, held twelve years as the age of female discretion or consent, rape after that age not being regarded as criminal.

Germany with sudden strides has coalesced from a number of independent principalities through the management of him of the iron hand, into a magnificent empire, based upon the destruction of human life. In this empire, where war underlies all, we find woman much more deeply degraded than during the old pagan days, when as chieftain and prophetess her voice was heeded even upon the battlefield. Now, while men are preparing to kill other men, the agriculture of the country and the lowest forms of mechanical labor fall into her hands. But it is not as responsible owner we thus find her; she cultivates the fields as a drudge, upon whom falls all the most severe portion of work. Equally in Germany as in other christian lands, is the wife looked upon as the servant of the husband, to whom she bears children that are his alone, and to whom greater deference is paid by the mother when a large number of little ones call him father.[98] It has been the custom to reward a husband in proportion to the number of children borne him by his wife, and it is but a year since a Parisian journalist suggested that for each additional child borne by his wife, the husband should be allowed half a vote. In Germany as under the common law of England, the wife is subject to chastisement by her husband, its severity being left to his discretion. But the height of barbaric absurdity and wickedness is found in that provision of the Prussian common law which decrees that a husband can determine the length of time his wife must nurse her child. As might be expected, at his death the wife is not regarded capable of caring for the children, and must accept a guardian for them; the law going so far as to declare her under age similarly to that French law which makes woman a perpetual minor. It matters not if the family property all came through the wife, or was accumulated by her labor, she is still held as not of sufficient judgment for its control. In Prussia, woman is still forbidden to take part in political or other public meetings.[99]

Morganatic or left-hand marriage still continues the custom in Germany. Under its provisions the wife does not take the husband’s rank, nor do the children inherit the father’s property, as they are not regarded as of full legitimacy. This form of marriage is recognized by the civil law of Germany, and is sustained by the church. The custom, at first confined to princes, gradually extended to the higher aristocracy, and as the moral perceptions of a nation bends itself to unison with civil law, the inferior gentry began to contract marriages of this kind. Under a morganatic union woman is still more debased than in the ordinary marriage relation. Aside from the ceremony, the wife is scarcely other than a concubine. The children of the morganatic marriage do not bear the father’s name, nor inherit from him, under the law of the state. Neither they nor the wife have more lasting claim upon him in these respects than had the concubines known as “the Honored Ones” upon the priestly destroyers of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Several notable instances of morganatic marriages have occurred within the present century. It is but a few years since the Grand Duke, Louis IV of Hesse-Darmstadt, son-in-law of Queen Victoria, made a morganatic marriage with Madame de Kalamine, whose lover he was long known to have been, and with whom he had previously lived outside of this relation, she having borne him several children. From the high position of the morganatic husband, and because of the previous relationship of the parties, this marriage became the talk of all Europe, and to some extent of the United States. Queen Victoria herself did not escape criticism, notwithstanding the prudery for which she is famed, because of her entertaining the Grand Duke at Windsor soon after this marriage unaccompanied by his wife,[100] for the purpose, it was intimated, of placing him under the influence of Princess Beatrice. The very fact of such suggestion, whether true or not, as well as the fact that Queen Victoria, universally conceded a prude in reference to infractions of the moral law by those of her own sex, received the Grand Duke at her especial home of Windsor soon after his morganatic marriage, is a vivid commentary upon the two codes of morals extant in christendom and their influence even upon woman herself. Morganatic marriage degrades the wife of the right hand ceremony equally with her of the left hand, as it is a recognition by the law of a christian country today of man’s right to become a bigamist, provided he but gives his left hand instead of his right, to the bride during the marriage ceremony. It is a system of legalized concubinage under protestantism, which throws the shield of protection around man in illicit relations, and like all other forms of woman’s degradation, it reaches back for authority to that religious teaching which proclaims woman to have been created inferior and subordinate to man. Because of woman’s former superior position there, no country but Germany can as fully show the degradation of woman under Christianity. Not from pagan Greece can more vivid illustration of her moral degradation be shown, while pagan Rome shines clear and bright beside the Germanic races of today. While even left-handed marriages among the higher classes are encouraged and protected, yet among the lower orders in Germany the ordinary marriage is cumbered with so many restrictions, as to have become almost an impossibility, and no disgrace or loss of character falls upon the girl of this class who becomes a mother outside of legal prevision, but such motherhood upon the contrary is looked upon as the means of a higher position and greater wages as nurse. As amme in a rich or noble family she becomes a person of arrogance, part of the pomp and show of the house.[101]

Despite these wrongs of the ages towards woman, of late so vividly presented, we still find both Church and State opposing a free discussion of the question. Within the last decade two northern European countries have strangely exhibited such hostility, the opposition coming upon ground of woman’s surpassing sinfulness.[102]

But the most notable opposition has been against the works of two eminent literary men. “The Doll’s House”[103] by Ibsen, the dramatic poet of Norway, attacking the irresponsible position of the wife under present marriage law, brought about the social ostracism of its author.[104] Sweden’s supremely great thinker of the present century, August Strindberg, recently published a work entitled “Giftas” (to marry), which incidentally treated of the influence of religion upon this relation.[105] The State authorities at once ordered its confiscation.[106] Instead of a Papal Librorum Prohibitorum, it fell under the censure and prohibition of a Protestant State. But no more ready method for increasing its circulation could have been devised; so rapidly was the first edition of four thousand sold that only four hundred fell into the grasp of the censorious government. In order to escape the farther penalty of imprisonment that had been pronounced against him, the author was compelled to temporarily leave the country. But his work was not without effect upon the minds of his countrymen, and upon his return a few months later, a great demonstration in his honor took place. Strindberg defined the rights of woman as those which came to her by nature but of which, through a perverted social order she had been deprived. He declared that woman’s desire for deliverance was the same as man’s restless desire for deliverance. Let us, said he, therefore emancipate man from his prejudice and then woman will certainly be freed. To that end it is necessary to work together as friends not as enemies.

That a work of this moderate character, should fall under the ban of a protestant government, in the last half of the nineteenth century, should be confiscated and its author banished, is a striking proof of the degraded condition of woman in the marriage relation, and of the power still exerted for the continuance of this subjection. Opposition to discussion of this question in Sweden, is more strange in view of the excess of women in the population, as they outnumber the men some 40,000; while of single women over fifteen, there are 259,000. Despite the fact of this excess, impossible to provide for by marriage even were that condition one of equity and equality, all effort towards opening occupations to them, or the avenues of education, still meets with resistance from the church. The only opponent of Mr. Berner’s Bill, 1882, for permitting women to take the first two degrees in the University, those of Arts and Philosophy, was from a clergyman. The bill passed the Odelstling, one of the two Chambers of the Storthing, with only his dissentient voice.[107] It received the unanimous vote of the other house, the Sagthing, April 21, becoming a law June 15 of that year.

Russia, which we are accustomed to regard as less than a half civilized country, gives evidence of an early civilization which in the field of morals reached a high place. Samokversof, a Russian author, has made a rich collection relating to pre-historic times, proving that as early as the first centuries of this era, the Slavonians lived in large societies, possessed fortified towns with treasurers of gold and silver, silk, embroidered tissues, iron weapons, ornaments of gold, silver, bronze and bone; while sickles, and the grasses of wheat, oats, and barley found in the graves of South Russia, show this people even to have been devoted to agriculture. The early history of Russia proves that women then held influential positions in the family, in the church, in the state; as was the case under the ancient common law of England, so woman among the ancient Slavs possessed the right of inheritance and the power of dividing such inheritance with her brothers. In the State we find woman’s wisdom at early date still continuing to shape the policy of the Russian empire; to the wise statesmanship of the Czarina Olga is the unchanging plan of that country for the ultimate possession of Constantinople due. Visiting the Patriarch of the East, during the tenth century, she at once perceived the vast importance of Constantinople to the power desiring universal domination; the possession of that city giving control of the Dardanelles, of Asia Minor, and Europe itself. Thenceforth she sought its annexation or seizure and her policy became that of the Russian nation, which for more than eight hundred years has made the ultimate possession of Constantinople the great object of its ambition. Nor has Olga’s statesmanship less influenced the entire European continent, the allied powers constantly struggling to defeat Russia’s aggressive plan, through maintenance of the “sick man” upon his throne.

From the advent of christianity, forced upon the Slav peoples a thousand years since by Vladimir, their baptism taking place by tens of thousands as driven into the rivers and streams mid-deep, priests upon the banks recited the baptism formula, a change was noticeable. As soon as the thorough establishment of the Byzantine church in Russia, which took no inconsiderable period, it being brought about by force rather than free will, its priests, like those of the Western Church, directed their principal efforts towards control of the marriage relation, and, through that, of the family. Nor are we to regard this as strange inasmuch as every form of christianity regards woman as an inferior being, the creator of original sin, rendering the sacrifice of a God necessary in order to re-establish the equilibrium overthrown by her.[108] Edmond Noble, in tracing the cause of the present social upheaval in that empire, says:[109]

Scarcely had the priests of the Greek Church begun their teaching of the new faith when change began to unsettle the position of woman and burden her relationship to the family with a sense of inferiority ... her status falling with the natural extension of the ecclesiastical policy. The Russian woman at last became the slave of her Christian husband; as much his chattel as if she had been purchased at market or captured in war.